Bedside Manner: Getting the Conversation Started

The statistics are sobering: 80% of people say they prefer to die at home, yet 70% die in a hospital, nursing home or other long-term care facility, often without ever having expressed their end of life wishes to their families or professional caregivers.???

Americans have been notoriously unwilling to talk about death and dying, and the politics around end of life care have hardly helped.? Remember ?death panels??

Fortunately, there are organizations working to change this.? One is The Conversation Project, a new public engagement project with a simple but potentially transformative goal:? to have every person?s end of life wishes expressed and respected.

The project is the brainchild of Ellen Goodman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, whose mother became ill and died last year.? ?My mother was unable to decide for herself what she wanted for lunch, let alone what she wanted to have for medical care,? Goodman said in an NPR interview.? ?And so it fell to me to make medical decisions for her.?

In one of her columns, Goodman once described her mother as ?the person who will listen to your problems until you?re bored with them.?? But the closest Goodman ever came to having a conversation with her mother about her end of life wishes was ?her pointing to someone or telling me a story and saying, ?If I?m like that, pull the plug.??? But, in the end, there was no plug to pull.

All of us can identify with Goodman and her mother.? In our small office, several of us have lost parents in the last year, and others of us are facing the declining health of family members or friends.? In addition, in our work to promote compassionate care and particularly during Schwartz Center Rounds? sessions held at hundreds of hospitals across the country, death and dying are frequent topics for discussion.

And so this is why we are proud to support The Conversation Project, joining the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the Cummings Foundation and the Cambia Health Foundation as founding sponsors of this important new initiative to promote what Ellen Goodman calls ?estate planning for the soul.?

Have you had the conversation?? If so, can you share your experiences and any lessons you learned?

Source: http://www.theschwartzcenterblog.com/2012/08/getting-conversation-started.html

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